


In Sunlight

by pipistrelle



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Episode Tag, Episode: s05e22 Children of Time, F/F, Flashbacks, Gen, Missing Scene, Spoilers, Terminal Illnesses, Trills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-06-10 04:29:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6939832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Tell me what happened, Yedrin," Jadzia says. "Tell me about Kira."</p><p>Yedrin's voice is flat, his eyes cold. "You mean how she died."</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Sunlight

**Author's Note:**

> so after going through Circle of Magic and the X-files, I swore that I wouldn't do any more fandoms involving sharp-tongued, snarky, badass redheads slowly dying from some wasting illness. I also promised myself that I would never write fic that involved my lesbian faves dying or being dead. And yet, here we are!
> 
> Warning: this fic contains a sharp-tongued, snarky, badass reheaded lesbian slowly dying from a bizarre wasting illness, and a lot of angst around it. Because this show hurts me and this is how I am working through that, apparently. I may put up a happy(ish) epilogue sometime next week, if I can finish it, but no promises.

* * *

"Tell me what happened, Yedrin," Jadzia says. They're alone in the engine room of the _Defiant_ , hard at work, Dax and Dax handing servos and scanners back and forth as they modify the engines to Yedrin's specifications. Jadzia's voice is so soft it almost gets lost in the deep electrical thrum of the impulse drive.

Yedrin glances up at her, startled, and gestures at the PADDs strewn across every flat surface. "Well, as I said, the quantum doubling effect seemed to respond to fluctuations in the --"

"Not that." Jadzia sets her scanner down and turns to face him. It's still so strange, look at her great-grandson who is also herself. "Tell me about Kira. About how it went."

"You mean how she died." Yedrin's voice is flat, his eyes cold. In the eerie blue glow of the plasma conduits his face is a stranger's face, with nothing of Dax in it at all.

Then his lips twitch and she can see herself in him, Jadzia and Tobin and Curzon and all the others, but changed. What she sees in the deep sun-weathered lines and shadows of Yedrin's face is herself wasted and wan, herself in terrible mourning.

"It was nothing at first," he says at last. "Just headaches."

* * *

"I told you, I'm fine," Kira protested. "I was out in the fields west of the crash site all day, helping the Chief with his surveying project. It's just from being in the sun too long, that's all."

"This is the third time this week," Julian replied. The Sickbay of the _Defiant_ had been torn completely open in the crash, so his domain had been reduced to a crude lean-to rigged against the side of the ship's hull, with the remains of one of the _Defiant_ 's rock-hard bunks as an examining table. The lean-to was only a few dozen feet square and after two weeks he'd already developed the habit of pacing around it, circling his patient like a hawk over its prey. Trying to watch him only made Kira's headache worse, so she shut her eyes.

"I've been in the sun a lot this week," she said through gritted teeth.

"You're not dehydrated," Julian went on. "Your electrolytes are perfectly balanced. There's no undue muscle strain in your neck or shoulders, no sign of infection, no adverse reaction to the plants or the air or the water here. If I didn't know better I'd say that, except for some lingering side effects of caffeine withdrawal, you're in perfect health."

Kira opened her eyes again and immediately regretted it as the room spun around her. "If you didn't know better?"

"Perfectly healthy people don't get headaches bad enough to make them faint," Julian said gently. He stopped pacing and moved to one of the haphazard piles of medkits salvaged from the ruins of the _Defiant_. "I'm going to give you something for the pain."

"Doctor, our medical supplies are severely limited, they have to be saved for emergencies --"

"Do you think I don't know that?" Julian asked, and again his voice was gentle, almost teasing. Under the teasing Kira could hear the bone-deep weariness they all carried around with them these days, through the days of backbreaking work and the nights of no hope. After two weeks, even the most optimistic of the _Defiant_ 's crew were starting to truly believe that they were going to be stuck on this planet for a long time.

The hypospray was cold on Kira's neck. A gasp of relief escaped her as the throbbing, twisting agony in her head started to subside. "My headaches are not an emergency situation," she said weakly.

"I'll be the judge of that, Major." All teasing was gone from Julian's voice; now all she could hear was weariness. "I'd like to keep you here overnight."

"What for? You don't have any equipment!"

"For my own peace of mind, mostly. How are you feeling now?"

"Dizzy," Kira admitted. Now that the pain was gone, she was more aware of the sickening way the table seemed to spin beneath her, and the planet spun beneath the table, and the whole galaxy and the universe spun wildly, tilting in unpredictable directions. Without the pain as a distraction, it was beginning to make her queasy.

"Lie down," Julian ordered, and she obeyed. She heard his footsteps recede, then return, and felt the pinprick in her arm as he drew blood. "Don't worry, Nerys. We'll get to the bottom of this."

* * *

"How long did it take him to figure out what was wrong?" Jadzia asks.

"Three days from the time he drew that first blood sample," Yedrin replies, his voice heavy. "Jadzia -- I -- we helped."

* * *

There was some equipment they were able to salvage; a replicator, a few dozen PADDs, a handful of tricorders. With the Chief's help, Julian and Dax even manage to cannibalize one of the proximity sensors on the _Defiant_ 's hull into an extremely crude magnetic resonance scanner, and that was how they saw it.

"There," Julian said, pointing at one corner of the grainy image he'd managed to project onto a section of hull plating using a gutted holo-emitter. "This bright section here, you see? That's neural degeneration."

To Dax it looked like a topographical map, like the terrain of some uninhabited moon seen from space, pockmarked with craters and alive with the labyrinthine twisting of rivers, only these rivers were the fissures in Kira's brain. Across the whole upper right corner of the image, a blinding white blot like a cloud reflecting sunlight obscured the gray matter. "That's not a fault in the scanner," Julian said. "It shows that the glial cells are disintegrating and the neural pathways are being destroyed."

"You're sure," said Dax. It wasn't even really a question. For three days she had done nothing but work on that scanner, she had been over every twist of every wire with her own hands, but still she couldn't help but hope that it was some kind of fault, a trick of the light.

"Can you treat it?" Kira asked.

"If we were up there --" Julian made a short, helpless gesture at the sky, one they were all getting into the habit of making. It meant _home, civilization, help, safety._ "I could operate, do a full neural pathway induction and stimulate the regrowth of the affected area before it spread to vital control systems."

"And down here?" Kira asked, soft and calm. She was pale but resolute; only her white-knuckled grip on the edge of the exam table showed that she might be under any strain.

"Down here, it would take me three weeks to cobble together the most rudimentary laser scalpel, and once I'd built it, it would be just as likely to kill you as make any kind of useful incision."

"And how long until this -- degeneration kills me?"

"It's not going to kill you," Dax said firmly. "Right, Julian?"

Julian ignored Dax completely. "Maybe two weeks," he told Kira. "Not more than a month."

No one spoke. The hush of the hot afternoon enveloped them, broken only by distant shouts of the work crews and the disorienting off-key song of alien birds.

Finally Julian cleared his throat. "Our supplies may be limited, but I promise you, Nerys, I will do everything in my power to keep you as comfortable --"

"No," Kira said abruptly. "Critical supplies need to be saved for people who can benefit from them. Not wasted on a lost cause." She glanced sharply at him as he hesitated. "That's an order."

"I'll remind you that I'm still Chief Medical Officer," Julian retorted. "In fact, I'm Chief Medical Officer of the entire planet."

"Then you know that it would be criminal to put my comfort above the lives of everyone on this planet," Kira replied, still calm. They were so calm, both of them. Dax envied them their composure; she wasn't sure whether she was going to burst into tears or mutilate something with a bat'leth, but she knew she couldn't stand around discussing this calmly for much longer.

Maybe sensing the pressure building up in her, Kira glanced over at Dax, her sharp gaze softening a little. "Jadzia, would you go and find Sergeant Ako?"

"Ako?" Dax asked stupidly. The name stirred up a vague memory of a blunt-nosed face above a red uniform, one she had passed in corridors for months without interacting much beyond friendly nods.

"She's deputy head of security. And Ensign Nila in Engineering, and Jarit Laka -- I think he's in one of the maintenance crews. They'll know what to do."

Finally the faces to match the names slotted into place. Ako, Nila, Jarit-- the only other three Bajorans who had been aboard the _Defiant_ at the time of the crash. Now the only other Bajorans on the planet. They would know how to give Kira a traditional Bajoran burial.

"Of course," Jadzia said and turned away, blinded by the tears welling up in her eyes, unable to stop them, unable to keep talking, unable to keep looking at Kira's face, pale but resolute, and Julian's face shadowed with the certain knowledge of long experience.

As she turned away she heard Julian say, "I'll talk to the Captain, if you like."

"Thank you," Nerys answered. "I think I'd like to be alone."

* * *

"I didn't see her again for three days," Yedrin says. "They wanted some kind of incense for the burial ceremony, a phenotypic relative of myrrh, but there hadn't been any aboard and we couldn't replicate it. I was the closest thing we had to a naturalist, so I went up into the hills to look for a substitute. It was -- easier."

"Easier," Jadzia repeats. She leans forward and reaches for Yedrin, digging her nails into his arm. "Tell me you went back," she says in a strangled voice. "Tell me you didn't leave her to die alone."

"She wasn't alone. Benjamin and Julian and Miles were with her. But don't worry, Jadzia, you went back," Yedrin says with a humorless smile. "You may be careless, but you're no coward."

Jadzia relaxes her grip on his arm, swallows in a dry throat. "I'm --"

"Not careless? Of course you are, you're Dax. Remember? It wasn't Curzon's witty repartee that made him a great friend of the Klingon Empire -- it was his recklessness. Torias' carelessness got him killed, and widowed Lenara."

Jadzia closes her eyes, trying to weather the sudden pain of Torias' memory and her own. "Nilani," she says.

"Of course -- it was you who tried to ruin Lenara because you couldn't control yourself," Yedrin replies without a pause. "I'm you, Jadzia," he says, more gently, but behind that gentleness is all the guilt Jadzia carries, and more, so much more. "You can't hide your faults from me. It was your carelessness in scanning that barrier that brought us all here."

"I wanted so much to know what was driving it," Jadzia says, knowing that he already knows, but needing to say it anyway. "It could have been a self-sustaining energy field -- or even a solar-powered one, a way to harness the output of a sun so efficiently we wouldn't need generators anymore. It could have been a discovery as big as another wormhole."

"And so you got careless," Yedrin concludes.

Jadzia takes a deep breath in the meditative style Kira taught her and leans away from him, resting against the cold metal plating of the wall. Its solidity is reassuring. "What about you? You're Dax, too."

"Me?" He looks almost startled, then that coldness creeps back into his voice and manner. "I'm just trying to give us a chance to atone for the mistakes we've made without destroying the good that came from them."

"Tell me the rest," Jadzia says. "Tell me what happened after you went back."

Yedrin nods. This is part of their atonement, too. "It happened fast. In a way, that was a blessing."

* * *

The _Defiant_ had burst open on impact, its hull weakened by the crushing pressure of Gaia's atmosphere, which it had never been designed to withstand. It came to rest at last propped halfway up the vertical, with the port nacelle buried deep in the earth at the end of a long gouged-out trench, and the starboard nacelle a few hundred meters in the air. It was the tallest thing in the rolling fields where they'd landed.

The ship's belly was torn open, providing easy access for salvage but no real way to shield the interior from the elements. After three weeks on the planet's surface most of the crew had moved to a cluster of jerry-rigged tents surrounding what would soon be the first finished structure of a rudimentary settlement. The days were long and hot on Gaia, the nights long and cold. From the few solar position readings they'd manage to take before the crash, it looked as if the northern hemisphere was beginning to tilt away from the sun along the plane of the ecliptic; it would be winter soon. They would need shelter.

The only one still based on the ship was Julian. He'd taken advantage of a hull breach caused by a blown-out plasma conduit to build a ramp into the _Defiant_ 's mess hall, which was canted at such a steep angle that he could use what had been the port wall as a floor. It provided a great deal more room and shelter than a tent, and he had claimed it for an Infirmary until another permanent structure could be built.

There were always plenty of patients, but the only one who stayed for more than a few nights was Kira. They had made her a pallet in the corner where the wall and floor met, with a lantern hooked over the jut of a bent access panel so she could read when she was awake.

She was awake less and less these days. She had adamantly refused any of Julian's hoarded stock of painkillers, and spent nearly a week in agony until he and Dax found a native plant with anesthetic properties that they were in no danger of running out of. It dulled the pain, and kept her sedated much of the time. "It's probably a blessing," Julian murmured to Dax over the low worktable as he put the finishing touches on the latest batch. "There's nothing we can do for the nausea and vertigo, it's probably best that she sleep through them."

"Here, let me." Dax took the beaker out of his hands as he started to yawn. "It's nearly midnight, Julian. You should get some rest."

"You're probably right, Doctor Dax," he agreed. He'd been calling her that a lot lately, sometimes teasing, sometimes closer to serious than she'd like. Of course, she was spending so much time in the makeshift Infirmary that it only made sense to lend a hand where she could. "Wake me at dawn, will you? Then it'll be my turn to pester you to get some sleep."

"Deal." He looked like he'd aged ten years since the crash. From the way he looked at her, Dax guessed she hadn't fared much better.

She was surprised to find the lantern on and Nerys sitting up with her eyes open, leaning against the slope of the wall. "Jadzia," Nerys said warmly, and the horrible thing was that she didn't look like she had changed at all. If it weren't for the involuntary tremors in her hands and the lines of pain around her mouth and eyes, she would have been indistinguishable from her old self, the one she'd been before Gaia, the one who wasn't dying.

"How do you feel?" Jadzia asked, settling herself cross-legged beside the pallet. "I have your next dose if you need it --"

"In a few minutes. I don't want to go back to sleep just yet." She held out one hand palm-up and Jadzia grasped it immediately, twining their fingers together. "How's the crew?"

"They're all right. Benjamin is working them so hard, they don't have time to mope much. He wants the shelter completed before the next phase of the moon, and at the rate we're going, he'll have it."

"I bet he will," Nerys murmured.

Jadzia leaned towards her with a conspiratorial grin. "And I hear that Julian has his eye on someone. A beautiful young woman who just transferred aboard last month. They might never have met if we hadn't crashed, and now he's spending every spare minute in her tent."

"It's about time. I thought he'd never get over Leeta." The ghost of a smile touched Nerys' lips, then faded again. "Any sign from Odo?"

Jadzia spared a glance over her shoulder at the monitoring chamber they'd salvaged from the Bridge, still with its cargo of liquid changeling intact. "There have been a few biomimetic fluctuations, but nothing concrete yet. Julian thinks he's learning how to counteract the morphogenic influence of the energy barrier, but there's no telling how long it'll take before he can hold a solid shape again."

"I'd like to record a message for him," Nerys said matter-of-factly. "In case he doesn't figure it out in time."

Jadzia squeezed Nerys' hand, trying to relieve the painful constriction in her chest. She thought about arguing, but the resignation in Nerys' eyes permitted no evasions. "I'll get you a holo-imager in the morning."

Nerys smiled in thanks and settled back against the wall. "I was always so sure I'd die on Bajor," she said, her gaze growing distant. Jadzia could hear the hint of a slur creeping into her speech, from exhaustion and pain or from the destruction of her fine motor pathways, there was no way to know. "Of course I could never know what the Prophets planned for me but… I was so sure they'd give me that…"

She was starting to slip away from lucidity, back into the twilight realm of pain and disorientation that seemed to deepen its hold on her every day. "Shh, it's all right," Jadzia said around the lump in her throat. She helped Nerys drink from the beaker of sweet-smelling medicinal brew, and helped her lay down again.

As Nerys' eyes fluttered closed Jadzia couldn't keep herself from gently stroking one cheek with the tips of her fingers. How many times had she touched Nerys like this back on the station? Late at night, after a few too many drinks at Quark's, she would stay up long after Nerys had drifted off and brush her fingertips over the curve of Nerys' shoulder or the angular jut of one cheekbone, just to marvel that out of all the trillions of creatures in the universe, this beautiful, battle-hardened, incorruptible woman was there, was hers. Sometimes she tickled the sensitive ridges on Nerys' nose, just to see her squirm and growl and bat the offending hand away.

This time there was no joy, no reassurance. "I'll get you back to Bajor," she said, hoarse and quiet, barely above a whisper. "It's the least I can do. Somehow, after all this is over…"

"No," Nerys croaked. "If the Prophets want me to die here, then I'll stay here." Her hand came to rest on Jadzia's, holding it against her cheek. "Take my earring back. For Ziyal."

"I promise."

"And bury me someplace bright. In the sunlight…"

"We will." It wasn't the first time Jadzia had made these promises. Nerys had been saying the same things for days now, over and over as her memory began to fail.

She murmured something unintelligible. "Nerys?" Jadzia asked, but she was already asleep.

"I'm so sorry, Nerys," Jadzia said, and it was all she could do to switch the lantern off before the tears came.

* * *

"Nerys saved a lot of lives," Yedrin says softly. "In the first month of winter a viral epidemic would have killed half of us if it weren't for the work you and Julian had done on finding native medicinal plants for her."

Jadzia nods. "Did she know?" she asks, trying to keep her voice level, detached. "Did she know it was you --  me? Who caused the crash?"

"She never blamed us," Yedrin says heavily. "Neither did Benjamin. They were better than we deserved."

 A flicker of something passes over Yedrin's face, some emotion she can't identify. For a moment she thinks he's struggling for composure, too.

"She has her own holiday in the settlement," Yedrin goes on, and the strange expression fades as his mouth turns up in the beginnings of a smile that looks like Lela's. "In the springtime, after the planting is finished. It's an independence day of sorts -- I thought she'd like that. We give thanks for our ability to feed and sustain ourselves without help from anyone but the Prophets. I tell stories about Nerys, and we put flowers on her grave. Did Lisa ever take you to see it?"

"No," Jadzia says. "You said -- the Prophets?"

"Some of us still follow the Prophets, even so far away from the wormhole. Is that so surprising?"

"I don't know. I suppose not. Do you believe in the Prophets?"

"You really should see Nerys' grave before you leave," Yedrin says. "It's the most beautiful place for hundreds of kilometers. There's a tree standing alone in the field, still standing and growing after being struck by lightning more times than I can count. It _survives_ , just like Nerys did."

"Yedrin," Jadzia says, and there it is again, something in his face that shifts, draws away. She'd taken it for anger at first, or resentment, his dislike of the host who got them into this mess. But it isn't only that. He's holding something back. "Yedrin, what aren't you telling me?"

"There's a great deal I'm not telling you, Jadzia," he says with weary patience. "Do you want to hear every detail of the past two hundred years? Every famine, every epidemic, every death? Do you want to hear how Benjamin died, or Julian, or Miles? I can tell you --"

 "No, that's not it." She leans toward him, intent on his face. He holds her gaze but looks like he desperately wishes he didn't have to. "I'm Dax too, remember? You can't hide yourself from me, Yedrin. Tell me. It's something about the settlement, isn't it? When you talk about it, there's something in your voice -- you love it, you want to save it, but it's more than that."

 At last Yedrin does turn away, his lips in a thin line, all bright chatter gone.

 This time Jadzia is the one who speaks with weary patience. "We're both Dax. You owe me the truth."

 "I've got to protect the settlement," he says, without looking at her, his voice rigid with control. "Eight thousand people, Jadzia, and I'm responsible for them. I've got to keep them safe. We promised."

* * *

 

She didn't know how long it had been since she'd slept. Probably it had been days, but it felt more like weeks. She hadn't been able to close her eyes for more than twenty minutes at a time without someone leaning into her tent to shake her awake. This time it was Benjamin, with a shadow over his face that had nothing to do with his ragged-edged knife-trimmed beard. "She's asking for you, old man," he said. "It's time."

She rolled off her cot and stumbled out into the predawn chill of the camp, still wearing the clothes she'd worn the day before, and the day before that. She probably smelled like an unwashed _targ_ , but there would be time to worry about that after --

Julian was waiting for her outside the ragged hole in the ship's hull that led to the Infirmary. "The degeneration reached her hypothalamus about an hour ago," he said without preamble. "Since then her temperature's been fluctuating wildly and she's been more or less delirious. Her body won't be able to take the strain much longer. I doubt if she'll last another hour. She asked to see you last time she was conscious."

Just inside the door was Miles, standing at halfhearted parade rest. He'd been coming by with flowers every day for the last week, but now his hands were empty. She nodded at him but he didn't seem to see her. His eyes were turned inward, fixed on his own private grief.

With an iron will Jadzia drove herself forward across the cavernous room and fell to her knees beside the cot in the corner. She was conscious of her own hands trembling, and aware that Nerys was shaking too, small convulsions that wracked her body without a moment's peace. Even without touching her Dax could feel the heat coming off her skin, more than a living creature could withstand.

For a blink everything blurred, overpowered by memory, and she felt heat like that coming off another body, so small, small enough to fit in her arms, and a doctor with thin, precisely scattered spots was saying _You're the mother, aren't you? Audrid Dax? Well, Neela's a very brave little girl, and she's putting up a good fight --_

No. That was another time, another fever. With a great deal of effort she pulled herself back to the here and now. She was so tired.

"Nerys," Dax whispered, and reached out to touch Nerys' burning forehead. The convulsions were slowing now, her body growing still again, until the only movement was the heave and gasp of her breathing. Julian and Benjamin were right, it wouldn't be long. Dax had seen breathing like that before --

\-- Curzon felt the effort of it, sitting in mud and blood with Lieutenant T'Kel's head on his knees as she tried desperately to move air into her lungs with half her chest dissolved by a black-market Romulan disruptor. Only a few more minutes now, and Curzon would get them all for this, he'd pay them back for every good Starfleet officer they'd slaughtered today, the green-blooded bastards --

No. She wasn't Curzon on a battlefield, or Audrid in a hospital on Trill, she was --

"Jadzia." It was barely a word. With a shudder Jadzia came back to Gaia, to the Infirmary, to see Nerys looking up at her, eyes half-open, every breath its own hard-fought war. It wouldn't be long. Only a few more minutes.

Nerys' hand moved, twitching at her side, her fingers searching for something. Jadzia clutched it in both of hers. She tried to speak but couldn't.

"Take care of them, Dax," Nerys rasped. "Promise."

Jadzia waited through the advance and retreat of another agonizing breath. "I promise," she said at last. She didn't know if Nerys had heard her. Those large, dark eyes slid closed, and Dax felt it in the hand she held as another round of tremors set in.

The next thing she felt was Benjamin's hand on her shoulder, heavy as lead. Nerys was still, had been still for some time, she didn't know how long. Those terrible, painful gasps had stopped. "Come on, old man," Benjamin was saying. "Leave her be. It's over."

It was over. All the fighting, all the waiting, all the pain.

Gently but firmly Benjamin lifted Jadzia to her feet and led her away.

She shuddered as he guided her across the threshold of the Infirmary into the open air. The camp spread out before her, incredibly, impossibly unchanged -- and there, high over the horizon, glinted the merest hint of gold.

It was a trick of the energy barrier, she knew, as it was excited by electromagnetic radiation from space into throwing off sparks in the visible spectrum. From the ground, in the dark before the dawn, it looked like sunlight.

* * *

"So you see, the settlement is my responsibility," Yedrin is saying. "When Odo took humanoid form again and found out what happened, he left us for ten years. He went up alone in the mountains to mourn. But I couldn't leave. We made a promise."

"And you've kept it. All this time," Jadzia says softly.

Yedrin is looking at her now, with a hint of Curzon's irony and scorn. "Of course. Wouldn't you?"

It's a joke, sort of, and Jadzia can almost treat it like one. She tries to smile, and thinks she just about manages it.

"You're shaking," Yedrin observes, calm and dispassionate again. Jadzia is surprised to glance down at her hands and see that he's right.

"We should get back to work," she says, standing up, steadying herself with one hand on the wall to hide the sudden weakness in her knees. "Thank you, Yedrin."

"You can thank me when I've saved us all," Yedrin replies drily. He isn't shaken up, of course not -- all of this happened two hundred years ago for him. It's an old wound, a scar from three lifetimes ago, and he's more detached from it than Jadzia will ever be.

But still, he kept Dax's promise.

"I'm going to go look at the sensor logs again," Jadzia says, trying to keep her voice from shaking too. "I won't be long."

Yedrin turns back to the open wall panel and the tangle of engine conduits inside. "Of course, Jadzia. Take all the time you need."

 


End file.
